Falling flat
by Scarlet Hondae
Summary: Writing is a way of expressing the soul, so why does his writing always fall flat? Rated because it's adult.


I was sleeping...or trying to. And then, wham! Sorry, no can do. I had to get thoughts out of my mind and this got pooped out.

No, I don't know what it is.

Bite me.

Summary: Writing is a way of expressing the soul, so why does his writing always fall flat?

Warning: I don't know. You tell me. Oh, and cussing.

Writing was kinda like singing, and everyone knew it. What people didn't know was _why _it was like singing. Some knew, of course, but people his age...they rarely paused to _think _about it long enough to _realize _it.

Writing, singing, dancing...they were all similar because they all involved you exposing your fucking _soul. _Sometimes, you got beautiful things, things that made your eyes tear up and your heart stutter. Those were the things people always said were full of soul, great works of art that told how a person really felt and what a person really was.

What those people didn't understand was it wasn't only the _beautiful _and the _graceful _and the _great _that were full of soul. The ugly and the sharp and the disgusting...they counted, too. They exposed a person's soul, captured the feelings and the heart of the artist, the author, the singer, the dancer. Even the things that fell flat, the things that sounded as if they _had _no soul, no heart, counted.

Some people, like Kim, sang beautifully, danced gracefully, wrote smoothly. She played the guitar with fingers of gold, her voice soaring to the heavens, drawing ears and hearts. Even her gymnastics was a form of art. Those moves were a form of dance, graceful and beautiful and even greater than her voice and music. She moved like liquid, showing the trinity of her soul, the purity of her heart.

Tommy...he couldn't sing all that well. He didn't dance except in a fight. What he did, though, what he did to reveal his soul, was _write_. He wrote night after night; pages upon pages, journal upon journal, filling his desk and shoving scribbles under his mattress and bed and dresser. Some things that he wrote, like the things from his childhood and the things that he wanted to just _forget_, were burned to ash and kept in a mason jar, as a reminder (he wasn't a kid, anymore, not a victim too scared to fight back, too terrified to tell). Other things, like the things he'd written during his time as the evil ranger, were kept in a special place, looked at every so often - he would never allow himself to forget those things, never allow himself to be that weak again (that had been the last time he'd truly been a victim, but the first time he'd made others so).

When Tommy wrote...it wasn't beautiful or smooth or graceful. It wasn't even full of edge. It was full of hate, words in sharp lines with bleeding ink, on a rare occasion. Most of the time, though, it lacked even that. It fell flat, as if no emotion were put into the words. It was more toneless than an essay for English class, full of nothing, nothing at all.

Tommy had been eight when he'd realized it.

He'd read online for as long as he could remember, losing himself by pretending to be others - not in games, like some kids, but by pretending he was the person in the stories, that he wasn't who he really was. He'd compared his writing to those pieces, even the ones with horrible grammar and spelling (_don't shame me, Thomas Oliver, with bad grades, _and he'd never done that, no, not after the first time, even after he'd been relocated). He'd been astute enough, even then, to realize that something was _missing_, something vital, from his own writing, from his own _soul_.

He'd been writing words, but he hadn't been writing stories, for all that he thought he was, for all that he thought he'd emptied his soul of the pages.

He was empty on the inside, full of nothing except the occasional star-burst of hate and even a little self-loathing. Nothing. At. All. No hope, no want, no wishes, no care.

When he'd found out, he'd burned everything he'd ever written and let it scatter in the breeze.

Then he'd stopped writing and starting fighting and later, a half-year later, started writing again. Fighting was good, it was nice, but...it didn't make him feel whole, it didn't let his brain rest at night, it didn't get rid of the restless feeling the way writing did.

Fighting, though, let him protect himself, and so he stuck to fighting as diligently as writing.

Not a single one of the rangers, none of his team, not even Kim, knew why he'd started fighting, not really. (It wasn't to protect other people or even protect himself, not really - it was so he could _hurt_ the people who tried to hurt him, first.) Neither did anyone know that he _was _writing at all.

No-one could ever know that his writing was still as flat as ever.


End file.
